The Glorification of Death

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With the first round of edits complete and the novel sent out to readers, I've moved on to the process of query-writing.  Not that any queries will actually be going out for some time yet, but it seemed like a good idea to buckle down and begin the work.  I think the current version is #3.  Getting there, getting there...

The process of researching and noting agencies is, as always, enjoyably frustrating: enjoyable because hey, books! and people to query! and frustrating because there are just so many pages to trawl through.  I am, however, beginning to memorize the agents of such bestselling novelists as Suzanne Collins, Cassandra Clare, Scott Westerfeld, and Stephenie Meyer.  And then there are the ones whose works are represented by more than one agency, and that just gets confusing.

Poking through lists of recent fantasy novels, I've also begun to notice trends.  One is that most of these books get some pretty awesome covers, and could I have a cover like that?  Why, yes, thank you, I will take the cover of Wither!  The second, though, is that dark seems to be incredibly in at the moment.  Everywhere I turn I see yet another book about the undead; about vampire-slaying; about the end of the world; about romance between a human and a devil or an angel and a devil or a SOMETHING and a devil.  Vampires are going out of vogue (Twilight is so 2005) and dystopian is in, but even in young adult novels technically labelled "fantasy," horror seems to be the overriding element. 

This is not to say that all of these are badly written.  I'm sure some of them are; I suppose some of them may very well not be.  Nor do I have what you would call an iron stomach, so perhaps I'm not qualified to judge the creepiness level of any book.  However, seeing all these books lined up in virtual rows and reading all these queries of books that sold has made me wonder where exactly the obsession with death came from.  Death is something alien to the way things ought to be and there is, or used to be, a healthy dread of it.  Now it seems to be embraced. 

I don't believe Christians ought to shy away from addressing the hard, dirty problems of the world: on the contrary, I think the attitude of treading on eggshells that believing writers adopt is part of the reason our literature is so terribly insipid.  Death is a hard, dirty problem that must be faced.  What I wonder in looking over recent publications is whether they are no longer treating it as a problem, or whether the authors are attempting to confront the problem and failing.  And I wonder, too, whether readers are not being inoculated to the issue by the prevalence of horror and skewed spiritual ideas.  If the trend continues, will it not become harder and harder to battle a problem that readers no longer imagine to be a problem?

What think you?

Out of the Ashes

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In the Sunday evening service at our church, one of the elders has been preaching (is it preaching if it isn't on Sunday mornings? I never can get the different words right) a series on Christ.  Christ in his different roles - Prophet, Priest, and King.  Christ as he is portrayed via word pictures - the Lamb, the Lion of Judah, and, I'm sure, many more to come in the next several weeks.  Each evening we start with a different jumping-off verse; last week's was Revelation 5, and the week before that was Colossians 2.

And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses; blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross; and having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it.

[colossians 2:13-15]

It was that last phrase that, in the context of the sermon, grabbed my attention most.  Sentences of Scripture will do that in those moments when you sort through the grammar (Paul's especially was awful) and find something of its meaning.  It can be a meaning you already "know," but I think we have all had times when something we "knew" actually came home to us as a thing of beauty and with maybe a little more clarity than it had before.  The whole series has been that way, more or less, but again, this section stood out particularly.

christ triumphant

We have a habit, I believe, of making Jesus Christ too tame in our conception of Him.  Even if we don't agree with making statues and painting pictures and portraying Him on screen, the images from our Sunday School days still haunt us: the gentle rabbi with long brown hair and a saintly expression on his often-beardless face (honestly, where did the beardlessness come from?).  Crucifixes and screencaps from "The Passion of the Christ" bombard us with the message of a Christ still on the cross.  And while it is certainly true that Christ dealt gently with some, it is equally true that He pronounced woes upon others, rebuked them, called them whitewashed sepulchers.  

And while it is also wonderfully true that He humbled Himself, suffered one of the worst deaths the human mind has managed to invent, and was forsaken by His Father and God, it is also magnificently true that in that death, He was triumphant.

The word picture Paul paints here in Colossians is one of a conquering Roman general in triumph through the streets of Rome.  All his enemies would be paraded behind him and made to literally eat the general's dust; his loot from Gaul, Hispania, Persia would be flaunted to all the people, a visible testament to his prowess on the field and the blessing of the gods.  This, Paul says with, as it were, a flourish of his pen - this is what our Lord and Savior has done.  He has made a show of Satan, death, Hell, the grave.  He has borne the curse and trampled on it; He has taken upon Himself all our sins, all our debts, all of the "ordinances against us," and also obliterated them.  

But the fantastic bit - the thrilling plot twist in God's redemptive story - is that all this was done through and in the single most potent symbol of disgrace and failure and humiliation: the cross.  "Cursed is every man who hangs on a tree."  "The Serpent shall bruise His heel."  Christ's heel was cruelly bruised, bruised to the death.  We can only imagine what must have been in Satan's mind that day, when he gained the death of the One Who was God Himself and Who was promised as the redemption of the people Satan had stolen.  He must have thought he had won, and that all the purposes of God had been brought to naught.  Perhaps in that moment he really thought that he had attained his goal: "I will be like the Most High."

He hadn't, though, because God has chosen the cross to be the vehicle for Christ's triumph.  That's the potent part: the part where you think, and the enemy thinks, that evil has won out and everything good has died forever.  And then you find out that it hasn't.  That God's wisdom was at play the whole time, and He has always had the upper hand.

the ideal and the parallel

Have any of you watched the Disney Hercules?  Do you remember the climactic scene where Hercules goes down to bargain with Hades to save Meg?  Perhaps it is a trite parallel (what isn't a trite parallel where something this wonderful is concerned?), but during the sermon I kept thinking of that scene: how Hades thought he had won, and then Hercules comes up over the edge of the cliff carrying Meg and he's shining and if you're a sucker like me you want to bawl.  It's an animated children's film, and still the thought of it makes me tear up as only a few movies can - the post-crucifixion scene in "Ben-Hur" is another.

The imagery is not limited to "Hercules," though, nor to a mere smattering of stories.  It is in fact a concept firmly engrained in the art of writing, and we have probably all heard of it in another, stiffer guise, that of "widening the odds," "upping the ante," and making it appear in the climactic scene as though the protagonist isn't going to win after all.  When you reach that climax, it seems as though all the cards are in the antagonist's hands.  He has his foot on the protagonist's neck; the protagonist has given it all he had, and now comes the end.

But then, of course, there is the twist.  It can often seem cliche, and we always have to fight to make sure it isn't; but it seems to me that the only reason it appears cliche is that it is so fundamental to the Ideal Story.  (I do believe in an ideal story.  I believe God wrote it.)  The tale of the Phoenix, rising again from its own ashes.  The image of the Greek hero getting off the ground when you thought all hope was lost, and going into battle for the final round.  The word-picture of  Christ breaking down the doors of Hell and triumphing through Death itself.  That, I think, is an ideal worth writing for.

Assassinations and Executions

Morbid a bit? Yes, rather, but I promise that this post is about writing. It is, after all, the only venue in which murders are allowable and assassinations are common fare; writers get to kill people any day of the week without fear of the law (although going around in public saying "I murdered someone yesterday!" is not advisory). It's one of the fascinating things about being a writer that you hold sway over the lives of your characters, despite the fact that the opposite frequently seems to be true.

Unfortunately, this often presents difficulties in stories. Most writers - I have never known one who didn't - become attached to their characters and regard them as friends and children, and some grow so attached that the thought of killing one of the characters terrifies them. I frequently hear things like, "Oh, I love my characters too much to kill them!" and "[Name of Character] insisted that he wanted to die, but I wouldn't let him." This refusal to follow the path of the story may result in a happier ending, but I'm willing to wager that it will not be as satisfying or meaningful a conclusion as it would otherwise have been. The characters live, but to what purpose? They are all happy for ever after, but does that destroy the whole drive of the storyline? Writers, if they want to progress and write solid stories, must pay attention to this as they determine the fates of their characters.

This analysis does not mean that writers should go the route of Diana Barry and kill all their characters indiscriminately; a depressing story does not necessarily equal a profound story. In fact, the stories that end in the death of the main character are and should be a minority, since in general people do not want to follow a person through a tome of six hundred pages only to have him be killed off in the end (unless the novel is Russian, in which case this is to be expected). Death should be doled out sparingly, but it should be doled out.

off with his head!

One important consideration is whether or not the death is necessary for or at least adds to the plot. In The White Sail's Shaking, for example, a good portion of the plot hinges on the murder of one of the characters. I'm fairly certain I'm going to get hate-mail for that, but it is what it is - the character had to die or the story would not work at all. This can also work in a smaller way when the plot itself does not depend on the death of a character, but the main character's development or some other important element of the story does. Although perhaps not as readily evident as when the plot is driven by a character's death, the grief, guilt, or anger that the main character feels at the death of this other person may be important in moving him through his character arc.

Conversely, writers have to consider whether or not the death detracts from the story. In planning my to-be-written novel Tempus Regina I expected to kill one of the major characters toward the end, but then realized that to do so would bring the story full circle and rob it of any point. Therefore, the character lives. Don't kill for the sake of tragedy or drama; make sure it adds to the story as a whole.

Another consideration, which may seem painfully obvious, is whether the death is historically accurate. If dealing with a historical figure, don't kill them at Place A and Time B if they didn't die there and don't have them survive Scene C if they didn't survive. In The Soldier's Cross I got quite attached to one of the characters, but they had to die in order to be accurate to history. (I was extremely cut up about it; I put The Soldier's Cross away for about a month because I didn't want to write the death scene.) Although alternate history is becoming popular, it is in its own genre and shouldn't be mixed with others.

we survived, but we're dead!

The somewhat easier considerations of when to kill a character aside, how do loving writers survive these deaths? All right, so I'm being a little facetious, but I do know the difficulty of killing off a likable character and knowing that he won't be there for the rest of the novel. An enjoyable and helpful solution is to work on fleshing out that character's backstory, which serves the dual purpose of giving you more time with that character and of deepening his personality in the parts of the story where he does show up. The deeper his character is, the more likely it is that his death will resonate with readers and make them care about the rest of the story.